Hello stranger!

Hackweek V: YaSTroid

Hackweek is an excellent opportunity to try something new. Hackweek V was not the exception. From June 7th to June 11th I joined a fantastic group of hackers to implement YaSTroid, our Android Front-end to WebYaST.

The week was fun. Learning new stuff, in this case Android, always helps me to see things different and somehow makes me appreciate other development platforms. Recalling Java was not that difficult. Honestly I thought Java had something new to offer to all developers, but it seems that Java hasn’t changed dramatically in years.

WebYaST and YaSTroid

WebYaST is an open source project which goal is to provide a web front-end for YaST functionality to enable remote 1:1 management. The interaction is basically like this (see the detailed diagram to get more information):

WebYaST and YaSTroid communicate using the REST API. If you have installed WebYaST you can access the documentation locally using:

This website should show you a list of available methods and their arguments, if any, and examples showing you how to use them and the data returned. Pretty straightforward. Is also good idea to read the source code in case the documentation is missing. Everything is written in Ruby, so it should really simple to read.

Getting YaSTroid

Developing YaSTroid requires having Eclipse and Android installed. After that clone the repository. Make sure you are using Android 1.5 when defining your virtual device.

git clone git@gitorious.org:opensuse/yastroid.git

Result

Stephen and Scott recorded a video demoing the application using a real device, I recommend watching it full-screen to see all details.